


The Listening Lion

by BuddyTheMeanPeacock



Series: Storyteller [2]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Angst with a sad ending, Gen, Let's be sad again bois
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2021-01-08 02:55:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21228617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BuddyTheMeanPeacock/pseuds/BuddyTheMeanPeacock
Summary: A lion listens to a story told from... a friend?Alternative POV to A Story of Trust





	The Listening Lion

The years did little to dampen Claude's aura, Dimitri mused as they stood in Claude's massive bedroom in Almyra. Dimitri would not have thought they would talk privately here, but then he never was good at predicting Claude's actions.

What little shock he had was soon replaced with anger. Claude's disappearance affected everyone around him - his house, his land, his friends, the professor. Gone with no trace as soon as Nemesis was defeated. It was devastating how fast he left, how _completely_ he was gone.

And here he was, smiling away as if nothing had happened.

"Claude, how could you? It has been nearly _ten years_. You leave without a word, and now suddenly you ask for my presence in an audience? Do you realize how worried all of us were?"

Dimitri tried to keep his temper, but even he could hear desperation in his voice. The letter was a diplomatic request to discuss opening trade routes, written professionally but peppered with Claude's charm, as though it were a regular routine instead of the first time Dimitri's heard from him in a decade.

Claude chuckled. "Aww, are you saying you missed me Your Kingliness? I'm flattered, honestly."

His response angered him, irritation crawling through Dimitri's blood. This was his answer? _Jokes_? As though his words meant nothing?

"_Claude, enough!_" He makes no effort to keep anger from seeping into his voice. "I answered your letter under the pretense that you would answer to me why you abandoned us, and I will not tolerate any of your gaffs. You _will_ tell me, right now."

It wasn't until the word slipped from his mouth that he realized that was what he felt: abandoned. Claude left them- _planned_ on leaving them, made it to where his disappearance would have minuscule political ramifications, as though that were enough to justify him turning his back and leaving, only to be seen if he wills it.

Claude waved his hands near his face. "Ooohh, so scary!" came the mocking tone. "But I don't think killing a king would help much with negotiations quite-"

Dimitri has had enough of Claude's nonsense. He took a step towards Claude, knowing the effect his large figure would have on the shorter man. Claude stopped talking immediately, fear flashing across his eyes. Dimitri felt regret take root in his chest but he knew he could not get Claude to the point otherwise.

Claude recovers quickly, fear replaced with a irritating and familiar guarded smile. "Alright, alright! I may keep a secret or two but I would _never_ lie." Dimitri went to refute such a ridiculous claim but Claude's next words shocked him, "Take a seat. I'm going to tell you a story."

Dimitri narrowed his eye, an eyebrow quirking up against his will. He debated if he should let Claude do so, fearing it was some scheme to distract him. In the end he relented. "This had better not be one of your tricks," he warns before taking a seat in one of the chairs.

A strange glint takes over Claude's eyes, peering through his nonchalance and suggesting something far more nefarious. "_Never_," Claude says, his voice in what could only be accurately described as a purr, and Dimitri suddenly felt sick, a new flavor of regret blanketing his tasteless tongue. "Now, let me start..."

Claude took a breath and settled his gaze on Dimitri. He spoke of a boy who lived in a land of desert, prairies and mountains. An odd boy with a secret his was told to tell no one. A lonely boy who snuck out of his home and found his first friend.

An innocent boy with innocent thoughts.

"Friends don't keep secrets from each other, right?"

A trusting boy who told his secret to his friend. A confused boy who didn't understand his friend's reaction. Dimitri felt a pit in his stomach.

Claude kept a fantastical tone, even as tension mounted. Dimitri hoped and prayed that it was a simple misunderstanding, that he's never seen this friend of Claude's because of some other unknown reason.

"They met again, weeks after he had shared his secret. The boy was determined to make his friend see that they were still friends, he didn't have to act weird around him. He went to his friend-"

A lie, even. An intricate fabrication, made up to make Dimitri forget Claude's offense-

"and felt pain."

The fantastical tone vanished. Claude turned his eyes inward.

"He looked down. A dagger in his chest."

His gaze moved back up. Fear and confusion stitched an ugly pattern across his face.

"He looked up. His friend's eyes, a blazing inferno, twisted and morphed by hatred."

As if possessed Claude's own face took on such contempt, his green eyes a poisonous bog.

** _"'Die, monster! I won't let you take Almyra!'_ _"_ **

The shriek tore at Dimitri's ears. Anguish, loathing, a pure, unfiltered _hatred_ seeped out of every sound that left Claude's mouth, every movement from his body. It was unlike anything Dimitri has ever seen, let alone from Claude.

As soon as his face shifted to hatred it changed back, after a breath. 

"The boy had felt feeling leave the tips of his fingers and toes," Claude continued, "He tried to breathe but his throat was closing and opening of its own will. His eyes tried to focus but everything had spun, everything was blurry, he could only see two small caves filled with fire. He reached for his chest but his arms were numb. He moved to run but legs instead buckled. Everything was darkening, all feeling was leaving."

Claude rose a hand to his chest. "Except for the beating of his heart. He swore," and he threw a useless, dead wink, "swears to this day, he could feel it beat against the cold, unfeeling steel."

Claude wasn't lying. No matter how talented a liar he was, no one could fake that fear in his eyes, the tremble in his voice as he spoke, the familiar subtle shaking and twitching of his body as he remembered brushing against Death's hand. 

It made Dimitri's own blood run frigid.

A smile returned to Claude's face. "Of course, the boy was saved." The whimsical skip to his voice was back, pushing away the terror. "Miraculously found by his instructor who happened to be near, he was told it was that and his mother's blood that allowed him to be saved."

If Claude had been anyone else, if he hadn't had his Crest, he would be dead. His last memory would have been betrayal, fear, and pain. The thought brought back whispers of family long dead, and it was only due to years of recovery and practice that he didn't snap the armrest in his grasp into splinters.

"As the boy laid in his bed, his mother and father had come to him. They knelt by him. Much of what they said was lost to the boy, but he hadn't forgotten everything."

Claude took on a stern expression. "'You can't expect to stay alive if you make no effort to keep yourself safe,' his father said, eyes golden like the silks he wore. 'We can't save you from everything. You must learn to look after yourself.'"

Dimitri's eye widened, a rush of anger heating his chest.

Claude's face turned subtly more gentle. "'Son, there is something you must learn.' The forest look at her little sapling and spoke words he would never forget. 'Giving out trust is like taking in poison.'"

Dimitri gritted his teeth.

"'You only do it if you absolutely must, and only in small doses. You must only indulge in the toxin of liquor, just as you only trust those you know can be trusted.'"

_Crack_

His self control was slipping, his jaw aching and body tense from trying to hold back his grip, desperate for some relief from the hot rage pulsing through him. Such... _disgusting_ words to tell a confused and afraid child. Claude needed to know that his mother and father would always be there, that this event was tragic but they would not allow it to happen again. Instead they instilled mistrust, told him that it was Claude's fault for being careless and not the fault of a rotten boy who was willing to kill his peers over nothing.

"They offered no words of comfort, but the boy knew they cared," Claude said, his smile erasing the serious expression. "The words they had spoken would stick with him, as the attacks against him grew ever more frequent in occurrence."

Dimitri met them not half an hour ago. Claude _introduced_ him to them before coming to this room, a smile on his face as he showed Dimitri his graying but strong parents. They greeted Dimitri with happy shouts drenched in endearingly thick accents, so glad to see Fodlan's "strong king." It was partly why Dimitri had been so angry, that Claude had treated his coming here as though nothing was wrong.

How _could_ they? How could they ever feel so jolly and carefree, knowing what they put their son through?

"One day, the boy becoming a young man, he found out about a place named Fodlan, the land of his mother. He found out his station in such a land, and left for it, leaving his father's tongue for his mother's home."

He left. He just... left. He knew no one in Fodlan, likely didn't know the language proper, he would have had no one to come with him, and he _left_.

"A new start, he was hoping for. No poisons, no daggers, no eyes transformed by anger. A dream planted itself inside the damaged young tree, of unity and peace."

It was admirable that Claude rose up from his past with such selfless ambitions. Dimitri knew that few men could say they want peace after such a breach in trust from those they held dearest. He knew he was not one of those few men, once.

"It was almost stabbed once his feet landed on the soil."

Dimitri snapped out of his thoughts at Claude's tone. His eyes were looking in Dimitri's direction but... it was if Dimitri were glass. Claude's stare went right through him; an icy finger ran up Dimitri's spine.

"It was the same. He could see how they looked at him. They were disgusted, just as they were, just as _he_ was." Claude's fists tightened at his sides, his body trembling as his words stumbled out of his mouth. "Waiting for him to drop his guard, waiting for the chance to kill him, but he won't let them, _he_ _won't fall for it again-"_

Claude flinched, as though he realized how fast his words were, how his voice was rising and rising until it was near shouting. 

This wasn't part of the story. The fear... it was real. Ingrained in him, so deep not five years of war, not years of kinghood, not sixteen years of time from when it happened could be rid of it.

Claude closed his eyes and took a breath. He opened them and it was hidden away once more.

"The young man eventually adjusted," Claude went on, ignoring the pause to the flow of the story. "He honed his easygoing smile and nonchalance to a fine point among those around him here, more willing to let him in in their ignorance as he soaked in their land's history."

Claude rose his hand to his heart.

"He keeps his secret close to his scarred chest."

Vague answers, strange mannerisms, unusual gaps in his knowledge of Fodlan's culture; now it makes sense. It was no wonder Claude was so cautious.

"The young man one day was told to go to a grand school. The Officer's Academy, inside the magnificent Garreg Mach."

And Claude's eyes peered directly into Dimitri's one, piercing it as though they were arrows fired from his bow. Dimitri stilled, the flame of anger fizzling away as Claude's gaze froze him in place.

"It was there the young man met a fellow student. Eyes like the ocean and hair like wheat. He was a prince, the young man found. His chest had felt cold for a beat."

By the Goddess, what did Claude feel when he learned of that? That what had nearly gotten him killed was what made Dimitri revered? That-

His thoughts were disrupted by Claude's face.

It looked... relaxed, almost- as close Claude could come to such a state. His eyes held a faint gleam to them, one that was familiar. Dimitri sucked in a quick breath; he hasn't seen it in Claude's eyes in over fifteen years.

Fondness.

"Prim and proper, and as softhearted as the had came, the young man had found the prince oddly easy to talk to. The prince was easily flustered," Dimitri felt a rush a heat, now to his face, "but always returned the young man's quips with one of his own. He had found himself seeking the prince out often, and the prince had never refused his company. Eventually, the prince was the one to seek out the young man, much to his surprise."

Dimitri remembers that time well, the mysterious heir to the Leicester Alliance with all sorts of malicious rumors circling him who had always managed to find Dimitri. Claude would always ask him about Faerghus' culture, so curious and hungry to know more, and he would drop interesting tidbits about outside countries Dimitri never thought to research in exchange. Claude would always keep him company in the library as they chatted over the various books they read. His presence was so unlike anyone else Dimitri knew, the closest equivalent being Sylvain. 

It was his experience with said friend that let Dimitri notice the small things.

Claude never let his back be to doors- much like now, he realizes belatedly. He knew everyone's strengths and weaknesses, what they liked and didn't like, what their mannerisms were. No matter how vile people would speak to him he would not get angry, always looking to be the one one sympathizes with. It reminded Dimitri of his deceptively guarded friend whom he lost much of his closeness with. 

Claude was so lonely, however. Sylvain would genuinely smile with Felix and Ingrid. He had never seen that with Claude, and Dimitri had wanted to change that.

"He tried to keep his guard up, but he found he couldn't." Then too soon the gleam in Claude's eyes vanished, his smile dropped. "One night, his racing thoughts became too much," the unseeing gaze took hold, "and this was the night. He could feel it, why else would he be feeling like this? If he closed his eyes they would come, _he_ would come, thrust his dagger in my chest and kill me-"

A sharp inhale of breath. Claude closed his eyes once more, took in a deeper breath.

"He had found himself outside the prince's room," he breathed out, "eyes wide and he breathed slowly, so slowly, and deeply, trying to stop the trembles that racked his body."

Dimitri closed his eye, the memories of that night coming back. 

_He had opened his door and was shocked to see Claude, looking as though he'd seen death itself._

_"What are you-" he had started to ask, but Claude interrupted him._

_"Lemme crash here tonight."_

_His tone and his body language had juxtaposed against his easy words so bizarrely. Dimitri had never seen Claude look so... vulnerable. He had always seemed higher than life whenever he and Dimitri talked, but it was though he had crash landed. He couldn't hide the abject terror coursing through him._

_Dimitri knew the feeling well._

_He had let Claude in his room, no probing questions despite his desperate urge to know what was wrong, what had happened to Claude to make him behave like this. He knew Claude was in no state for any such interrogation, knew that Claude was always averse to such acts even in the best of headspaces let alone the one he came to Dimitri in that night._

_He had simply lead Claude to his bed and laid with him, wrapping his arms around him. He knew on his own worst nights, when the voices were screaming and his family was on fire all over again, that he wished he had someone to latch onto, anyone to ground him back. He had hoped that Claude would feel the same. He had held Claude tight against his chest, hoping and praying the trembles, the twitches, the deep and fearful breaths would eventually stop, that he could give any amount of comfort to his friend. Dimitri held immense joy when the taut bowstring that was Claude's body slowly eased into relaxation, body stilling and breaths evening out._

"The loss of freedom in movement should have upset him, the young man thought," a soothing voice called, "but it was instead the safest he'd felt in years."

_And he was happy, so happy, that he managed to help Claude, that he had done something right. So happy that Claude had trusted him enough to come to _him_ for relief, and Dimitri never wanted that to change_.

"'I will not let anything happen to you,' the prince told the young man."

_And he meant it. He wanted Claude to know that he was there, ready and wanting to give him anything he needed._

"The young man had taken in those words, drank them in, had gotten drunk off of them. He didn't want this feeling to leave."

Dimitri suddenly felt something crawl against the back of his throat. Dread. Something was wrong.

"He indulged." Claude's eyes were still on his. "He drank, and drank, and drank."

No.

Dimitri knows what's coming. No, no, no-

"Until it happened. A princess waged war, and the prince's eyes were twisted and morphed by hatred." Whatever fondness had been in Claude's eyes before was gone, murdered by the fake smile plastered on his face. "The young man should have stayed away, but he was addicted, begging for one last drop. He was pushed to the side."

Claude's face turned, overtaken by anger. 

"'Nothing matters more to me than having that girl's head!'"

Dimitri could almost hear his voice leave Claude's mouth. He felt sick remembering the consuming hatred that engulfed his being all those years ago. Claude was a distraction from appeasing the dead, nothing more and nothing less, just like everyone else. 

Except Claude wasn't supposed to be like everyone else.

Claude's eyes were... strangely mocking, acted anger turning into a smug smirk. "How easily he was thrown away," he says, resigned, as though he betted on the wrong horse and lost 5 gold in a friendly bet. "The young man stood there, speechless, watching the prince turn from him. Soon the prince was lost in the chaos of the invasion."

Claude tilted his head back. "Five years pass. Five years of restless nights filled with would-be assassins, of foods tainted with substances only his mother's blood saved him from, of politics of a land he was just coming to know consuming his life. In the moment all was clear," and he sighs, tired, "but to remember it was hard; it all blurred together into one incomprehensible mess."

Claude looked back to Dimitri. A peculiar look was on his face, his lips twitching and eyes failing to guard... something. 

"The tides of war change and the young man- a man proper- saw a chance for victory. He heard of the prince's family flags raising in areas and he felt the urge to drink return." And he smiled, a genuine smile that made Dimitri ill. "It made him sick, but such was the nature of liquor, right?"

Please, Goddess, _no_. 

"The battle came and the man saw the prince, one-eyed and battle hungry. The man rushed to the prince."

He wanted to gouge his eye out, stab a spear through his ears, rip off his head. He didn't want to hear this, he didn't want to see this, please, he was sorry, _so sor_-

The ghost of rage that was buried ten years ago came back and slithered into Claude, his face stretching and contorting into pure hatred, his smile an animalistic snarl and eyes a disgusting acid.

** _"'Move, or I will run my spear through your chest! I will not allow you to take her death from me!'"_ **

The screech echoed in the room. Dimitri flung his head to his knees, grasping at his hair for a futile hope of escaping the waves of guilt and anguish, contorting his body to not have to look at Claude.

He didn't know about the boy. He didn't. He _didn't_.

"Time stopped." Claude's voice was calm. Detached. He kept going, cruelly, and Dimitri deserves it. "The man's head exploded in pain but he hadn't moved to ease it. A ringing in his ears drowned all sound as though dragged down in the raging ocean of the prince's eye. He had felt his heart beating, and he swore, swears to this day, that he grew colder with each pulsation."

Dimitri felt his face sting. He shook his head. He did not have the right. He deserved nothing better than sitting in this chair and listening, no matter how much his body urges him to run away from this delusion that took on Claude's form. He slowly rose his body, lowered his clenched hands, and looked back up at Claude.

Nothing.

Utter indifference. Not a single emotion. His eyes were open for Dimitri to look all he wished but they were simply... empty.

"It must have been fate."

Monotonous. Flat. Almost droning.

This was familiar.

"An arrow, tipped with knock out tranquilizer for prisoners, drawn and fired. The prince enraged but quickly slowed and sedated. The battle finished and the prince carried back to base. The man in his room stared at walls, silent."

Claude's dead eyes stared into Dimitri.

"He'd been drinking poison. He won't make that mistake again."

A wet streak trailed down Dimitri's face. His heart was not beating; Claude's words wrapped around and squeezed it to the cusp of bursting. He cannot breathe but for quick gasps. And yet he lived on, and was not in some hellscape; the four springs of pain in each of his palms told him so.

"He helped in the prince's recovery, of course. He was needed to win the war."

Those words clicked something in Dimitri's mind. Memories flooded his mind once again.

_He was standing at the rubble in the cathedral, one of the few places that had given him a modicum of solace. He had wished to be alone, but there was a man standing next to him._

_"Dimitri, please," he had said. Dimitri had never known Claude to beg. How pathetic to do so to a beast like him, he had thought. "Tell me you didn't mean what you said at Gronder. **Please**."_

_Dimitri had looked at Claude. His eyes were crinkled with desperation, pleading with Dimitri to give him mercy. _

_Unfortunately for Claude he had none to give._

_"I know you are averse to the lies of others. I will not tell you one now."_

_A brief moment of shock. Betrayal. Despair. And then..._

_Nothing._

_"I see," was his response, dead as the corpses that littered Dimitri's life. Without another word he had left Dimitri alone with his father_. 

"It took time but the anger eventually left the prince, leaving only guilt and remorse. The prince begged for the man's forgiveness, and the man took the prince's apology with an easy going smile."

Dimitri remembers the complete insincerity of Claude's response. Even as distraught as he was he could tell he had received nothing that resembled forgiveness.

"He threw the poison away. Such words would not get to him again."

Dimitri grunted, trying and failing to stay utterly silent. _'I meant what I had said that night, I swear I did!'_ his mind screams. _'Please, please do not say that, **please** stop looking at me with those eyes-'_

"Eventually the war waging princess was killed," Claude continued, ignoring Dimitri's distressed noise, "their sudden last enemy defeated, and the man returned to his first home, discarding his second, telling no one. He worked tirelessly to work on the latter half of his dream, somehow still strong despite the tainted tree it grew from."

It was a miracle. An honest-to-Goddess miracle that Claude was able to keep hold of his dream after everything he went through. Dimitri wonders if it was still a pure dream or if poison turned a true want of unity into a vengeful spite against those- those like himself- who tried to stop Claude.

"Now, the man was finally king. He could build off his work as prince and as a young man in Fodlan, to make sure a young boy doesn't feel his heart beat against steel."

Chilling words spoken with a corpse's voice to end a wretched story. Dimitri's thoughts vaguely land on Claude's parents, wondering again how they live so happily. How they could live without guilt devouring their every breath for playing part in Claude's pain. Dimitri sat in his chair, hand back on the cracked armrest and breathing deeply, trying to settle his raging emotions-

And then Claude laughed.

The dead brought back to some sick imitation of life, Claude _cackled_, a twisted noise that scratched against Dimitri's ears. 

"You should-you should see your _face_!" Claude breathed out. "You look like some- like a- like a _dead fish_! Please close your mouth, you're gonna kill me!"

It was horrifying, the sound, akin to the wails of the damned. He needed it to stop. 

"Claude-" he started, but was soon interrupted.

"And _oh_, when you blathered on about how _I_ abandoned _you_," the irony seeped into Dimitri's veined and pulsed throughout his body. It made him sick, sicker than he's ever felt, but Claude seemed to revel in it. He threw his hand against his forehead like a poor actress in a poor opera house and continued, "how you all were _oh so worried_ about me-"

No, he wouldn't allow it. The faces of the Golden Deer as they realized Claude was gone, the professor's, and more; they did nothing wrong. Their feelings were real.

"We _were_-!"

"Yes, yes, I'm sure," Claude spat out. He took a steeling breath. "I'm sure you all were so worried about where I was... unless I'd told Lorenz I was prince of Almyra." And he looked at Dimitri, _looked_ at him, eyes filled with an emotion Dimitri couldn't place but drowned in nonetheless. "Unless I told Hilda. Until your _little_ lion cubs or those _loyal_," it looked it hurt Claude to even say the word, "Empire eagles found out. Then I would been a threat. The Alliance would have gotten rid of the Almyran rat that snuck past the border-"

"_C__laude_-!" No no no, Claude could not have truly thought this way-

But Claude barreled past his objection as though he had been quiet. "-the Kingdom would have made sure their _precious king_ couldn't be killed by foreign murderers _again_-"

His father burning in the flames, his head rolling from his shoulders as Dimitri stood helpless, useless, undeserving of life when he couldn't save his own father. 

The image flashed so vividly Dimitri couldn't help his cry of anguish. Claude's eyes lit up at the sight but were still consumed by-

Consumed by-

"-the Empire would have roused mistrust and chaos to gain the upper hand. I've thought about this, Dimitri." His name on Claude's tongue never sounded so loathsome. "It all ran through my head, night after night after night. I knew what would happen. I _saw _their faces, I saw what they felt, and if they didn't show it I knew they were hiding it, they would have wanted me dead just like _he_ did," Claude's eyes burned with hatred,**_ "__just like you did-"_**

Paranoia.

Pure, potent paranoia, ingrained deep into Claude's brilliant mind. Dimitri finally pinpointed it, finally recognized the true extent of what his words and actions have done to Claude. It was beyond Dimitri, far, _far_ beyond him; its roots were deep into every facet of Claude's life. 

It was like his one eye left was given new vision, the revelation showing him signs he missed. Claude's eyes were dragged down by heavy bags. His bed, tucked against a wall, looked as though no one has slept in it in years; doubtful he actually uses it, in case the assassins that he _knew_ were there would pay him a visit. He remembered Claude's penchant for poison crafting in the academy- oh, how adept was he now?

But Claude had suddenly stopped talking. Stopped looking _at_ Dimitri, only through him, his eyes wide and darting back and forth.

"Claude?"

No response. Not even a twitch. Dimitri's heart skipped a beat.

"Claude!" He said, louder, his grip tightening. 

Still nothing. Dimitri nearly leapt from the chair, but no, he can't look to be a threat, not with Claude like this; instead the end of the armrest shattered in his hand. Claude was not here in this room. His mind stole him away, leaving only a twitching body.

"_CLAUDE_!" Dimitri screamed.

Claude snapped his head towards him. A drop of relief, the only he's received throughout this entire horrid reunion, and he savored it like a man dying in the desert heat.

But now he had Claude's attention. He was letting him speak.

"I... I am so..." Dimitri began, but he stopped himself. No. Claude has been through enough; he didn't need Dimitri's pathetic apology nor some useless plea for forgiveness. Not after such prolonged torture.

"You've been suffering for so _long_, and none of us- none of us saw it."

Not his fellow Golden Deer, who cried so much when he left, so confused as to why he would do such a thing to them. Not the professor, usually so keen eyed with the sorrows of other, and yet Claude slipped through their fingers.

Not Dimitri. Not him, who foolishly accepted Claude's denial of forgiveness without even attempting to uncover why. Who thought that he was growing when he accepted he should leave well enough alone, that he couldn't force his apology to be taken.

Silence filled the room after his admission. 

A moment passes as they soak within it.

Then Claude glared at him.

A stabbing gaze pierced Dimitri's heart. Anger, hatred, rage, frustration; every word for the feeling that Claude's eyes invoked was unworthy. All that came close was...

Cold.

Claude broke the gaze. He threw his head back, covered his eyes with the heels of his hands and _keened_, a hideous sound that engulfed Dimitri's being with misery. This was no rancid boy with a dagger, no man with a spear crazed by revenge possessing the man before him. This was Claude, _his_ anguish, _his_ agony, _his_ loathing, and it tore Dimitri apart to witness.

A pause. Then:

"You ruined me," Claude finally panted out. "You... _ruined_ me, Dimitri."

Claude breathed in.

Dimitri choked out a sob, unable to keep it within himself no matter how much he wished to. It was true. It was so, so true, and- and-

"You..." Claude breathed out. He lowered his arms.

Dimitri wanted nothing more than to fix it. One more chance to make things right. He wasn't a king who has accepted that some things are unfixable, he was a prince who saw a lonely boy and wanted to make friends, who blushed at scandalous words spoken by a mischievous boy, who disregarded the rumors and talked with a brilliant boy, who comforted and shared his bed with a scared boy, please, let him fix it _please_-

Claude looked down at Dimitri, an easy going smile on his face.

Dimitri's world stopped.

"You think we took too long here? Rumors'll start to spread if we take too much more time by ourselves in my bedroom," Claude says with a wink, and Dimitri wanted to rip himself in half. Throw his body off of the rooftop. Have the Goddess herself strike him down. Anything, **_anything_** but this.

"Claude-" but he was ignored.

"C'mon, Almyran nobles may not be as picky with tardiness as Fodlan ones but it's still rude to keep them waiting."

"Please, _don't do this-" 'don't pretend like this didn't happen, don't pretend like you did not open your heart to me while ripping mine to shreds, don't pretend like we are _nothing_, please, please please I'm so sorry-'_

"Hmm, you're right. You look like a _mess_. Bad light to show yourself in. Don't worry, I'll be sure to......."

'_Please forgive me. Please, I'm begging you, Goddess strike me I'm sorry, I'm sorry, **I'm so sorry**..."_

Dimitri sat in the chair, head in his hands, body racked with sobs.

_"You've... _ruined_ me, Dimitri."_

He did.

He did

**Author's Note:**

> AKA "Claude wasn't nearly as calm as he thought he was"
> 
> Think I'll write some fluff for these two eventually. Or keep working on TLD. Who knows lol


End file.
